Surfer's Paradise

Today James and I hopped on the train and headed down to Surfer's Paradise. It's a beach town that's full of condos and resorts along the water. It's worth looking at on Google Maps/Earth because of all the little canals/rivers that break up the town. They've got about 20x as much waterfront in the town than you'd think if you just looked at the coastline.

But forget that, the real reason to go here is the absolutely massive white sandy beach that stretches along the whole coast. It's almost 20 kilometers long from one end of the other. By comparison, Long Beach in BC is only about 14 km long, even if you include Comber's Beach.

I was too busy having lots of fun in the water to take too many photos, but here's a wide shot of one side of the beach. What you can see in this one, up to the buildings in the far distance, is about a fifth of the beach at most.



But really, I've seen big beautiful beaches before. What I haven't seen before was hundreds of huge goddamn bats flying around in broad daylight. There's a park that we walked beside when we were heading back to the bus home, and all of a sudden a massive number of giant bats started flying out of the trees they roost in during the day. They were titanic fruit bats. Some local guy who saw us gaping told us it's pretty common for them to all flip out and fly around if something spooks them, but that didn't make it any less bizarre for us Canadians. There were literally hundreds in the air at once. I felt like I was in a scene from a Hunter Thompson book.


This photo was just a fraction of them.


After they settled down they went back to roosting. All those black shapes near the top are curled up bats.

Also, I'm a huge dork so I thought this apartment block was pretty funny.